Congratulations! You’ve decided to become a travel nurse. Now it’s time to figure out all your licensing needs.
There’s a lot of information out there on how to obtain your nursing license in each state. We’re breaking down everything you need to know, including the Enhanced Nurse Licensure Compact, temporary and permanent licenses, and what that means for nurses who choose to travel with TotalMed.
Travel Nurse Licensure Terms to Know
- BON: Board of Nursing. The regulating body that determines rules, regulations, and privileges of licensure that grants permission to an individual to engage in nursing practice.
- PSOR: Primary State of Residency. A.k.a., where you actually live. Your PSOR is determined to be the state where you claim legal residency via state-issued ID, voter registration, or tax address. This determines your state BON.
- eNLC: Enhanced Nurse Licensure Compact. The eNLC is an agreement between participating states to honor each state’s licenses. Nurses whose PSOR is an eNLC state are permitted to practice in both their PSOR and within fellow eNLC states.
- Nursys: Nursys.com is the only national verification database for nurse licensure, discipline, and practice privileges. Note: Not every state utilizes the Nursys database, in which case your state’s BON will verify.
Travel Nurse License Requirements, Types & FAQs
While we’d love to say our onboarding process is painless, the reality is it’s not. Coordinating things like credentialing, documentation, and housing can be stressful. Our robust full-team approach makes getting documents—and all the copies—as easy as possible, but that doesn’t make it any less time-intensive.
Remember our ‘robust, full-team approach’ that we just mentioned? We want to highlight that again, because having incomplete or missing qualifications typically prevents an assignment from starting on time. That can mean you’re leaving money on the table—and no one wants that.
Reminder: While most facilities do not require a BSN to be a travel nurse, you will need your RN license and at least 1 year of experience for most specialties. To see a complete list of specialties and everything you need to know to travel in your specialty, read our breakdown of Travel Nursing by Specialty.
